Cables: sagging wires & festoon strings
Hang a catenary wire between two points, then land each end exactly where you want it with the move tool.
Open in the interactive manual →The interactive version has full-text search, a table of contents, and light/dark themes.
A cable is a wire that droops between two points the way a real one does: power lines, festoon light strings, ropes, rigging. Choose Create ▸ Cable and click two points in the viewport (a "Drawing Cable" HUD confirms you're in draw mode; Esc cancels). The span appears between them, already sagging.
Shaping the span
With the cable selected, the Properties panel's Cable section holds:
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| Start / End | The two endpoints, in metres relative to the node. Type exact numbers here when you know them. |
| Sag | Midspan droop in metres. 0 is a taut straight line; the default is a gentle hang of about 8% of the span. |
| Thickness | Tube diameter in metres. A telephone line is a couple of centimetres; a ship's rope is much fatter. |
| Segments | How finely the curve is divided. More segments follow the droop more closely and cost a little more to draw. |
| Color | The wire's colour. |
Moving an end, like a vertex
A selected cable draws a small handle at each end. There are two ways to move one, and they're for different jobs:
- Drag a handle to rough the span in freehand. That drag runs on a plane facing the camera, so it's quick but has no axis and no snap: right for sketching, not for landing on something exact.
- Press and release a handle to select that endpoint. The handle brightens and grows, and the move gizmo appears on it. Now you're placing the endpoint the same way you place anything else in the editor: one axis at a time, with grid snapping and world/local space both honoured. That's how you put one end on one pole at an exact height, then select the other end and put it on the next.
While an endpoint is selected the cable's own move gizmo stands down, so there's only ever one set of arrows on screen and no doubt about which one moves the wire and which moves the end of it. Select something else to hand the gizmo back to the node. Each endpoint move is a single undo step, "Move cable endpoint".
The gizmo drives the endpoint, not the object, so a cable parented under a rotated or scaled group still tracks the arrows instead of drifting away from them.
Wind sway
Switch on Sway in force fields and the span swings in Wind and Turbulence fields, pinned at both ends with the most travel at midspan, like a line in a breeze. Response is how far it moves, Frequency how fast. Wind blows along a field's local +Y axis, so rotate the field to push sideways: an upright wind field won't move the cable at all. Vortex, gravity, pointer and camera fields are ignored by cables.
Cables take tap actions and preset animation like geometry does, and the Assistant and Claude over MCP can hang them for you: ask for a power line between two poles and you'll get one with sensible sag.